Saturday, July 04, 2009

July 4 Comedy Extravaganza

Well, it's independence day again, and there's one topic that makes me feel so patriotic (and funny!) that I get a little weepy: abortion. Yes. The slaughter of innocent globs of cells, the blood, the terroristic crime against humanity reminds me so much of our struggle against the British for our right to self-determination, and eventually our penumbral right to privacy and the legal ability to crush a fetus and vacuum its brains out with a Kirby.

I realize that this is a touchy subject for some people. Actually, it's touchy for just about everyone. Which I don't get. If you have a penis, you don't get an opinion about abortion. Period. Actually, you don't get those either. But I digress . . . .

The problem with the pro-life side of things is that they can't seem to distinguish between what's moral and what's legal. It's as if they can't simply believe what they want and abide by it. Here's a hint: if you think something is wrong, don't do it.

But that's not good enough. The pro-life peeps want some sort of legal validation for their beliefs. They want the government to reflect their religio-pseudo-scientific ideology. There's a word for that. We call those people terrorists. And we hunt them down and kill them, their families, their friends, their children, and we have a righteous anger against all things theocratic.

These people worry me because of their total inability to do or not do anything that the government tells them to not do or do. They are the best argument against the legalization of drugs. I'm afraid that if we, as a society, ever actually legalized drugs, all the right-wing fundamentalist Christian types would shoot speedballs and suddenly fail to act like decent human beings just because the government said it was okay to do so.

Never mind what Jesus would do.

Question for pro-life people: if murder were legal, would you whack your neighbor?

Actually, don't answer that. I don't want to be an accessory before the fact.

I would understand the concern if doctors were walking around trying to abort people––if it were a threat like, well, murder. But it's not. No one is going to sneak into your house tomorrow night and abort your dog or that waste-of-flesh teenage assclown of a son you have (btw, he's smoking weed and banging little Cindy McRottenCrotch down the street).

In short, dear pro-life readers, grow a pair. You don't need the government's validation, nor do you need the approval of the rest of society. Like anything else, abortion can be a sin if that's what God says. But it doesn't have to be a crime.

So you, gentle reader, have probably got me pegged as a staunch pro-choice advocate. If so, you weren't paying attention. I already said that anyone with a penis doesn't get a say in what happens in uteruses across the country.

In the interest of being fair and balanced, I will lay out the problems with the pro-death people.

They seem to have an equal and opposite anti-ideology ideology. It's as though they want everyone to go out and get knocked up and have an abortion just to make a point to the pro-life hacks. They too want to force the government to line up with their own vision of morality. If I were a woman, I would probably go do this just to piss off the right-wing yokels who think that Jesus was a blond-haired, blue-eyed white dude.

But (see cheap dick jokes above), I am not a woman, so I don't really think I can participate in this.

Like our illusory two-party political system, the pro-life and pro-choice movements have more in common than either wants to admit. They are, for lack of a better turn of phrase, strange bedfellows.

The pro-death people have what they see as an expanded view of morality that wants people to be able to do pretty much whatever they want--within certain tightly-controlled government constraints. The difference between the two camps isn't conceptual, it's only technical.

The problems with pro-death politics are the same as those with pro-life politics. The pro-death-ers want legal validation for their moral systems. The very slight difference is that pro-death people actually do smoke pot even though it's illegal.

Fundamentally, both groups are anti-American. Both groups epically fail to recognize the fundamental difference between morality and legality. Both groups assert that the government is the determining factor of the former, and that the later is a sign of the former. How confusing was that?

This is July 4th. This is the day that we celebrate the victory of our own terrorism over a kludgy, overbearing monarchy that had the audacity to insist that we line up with her socio-moral-political system. (sorry, brits. but you really were asking for it.)

Maybe today is a good day to quit begging for validation from a distant, corrupt, abusive daddy-government and look at ourselves and what we really believe and act on that.

Maybe today is a good day to think for ourselves and decide that the government is there not to enforce ideology or morality, but to let us do as we please so long as we don't go around raping each other.